The Internet of Things (IoT) holds a great promise for the future of a global communications industry. The connectivity of humans and machines (e.g., smart phones, tablet computers, home appliances, etc.) via high-speed mobile internet technologies such as Long Term Evolution (LTE), LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) and its evolution forms the basis for a successful global IoT implementation.
With projections anywhere from twenty billion to a hundred billion connected things (e.g., machines) by the year 2020, the IoT affects various industries, organizations, companies, and service providers that create the machine-to-machine (M2M) devices, network infrastructure solutions, and end users. Delivering a successful and cost-effective consumer as well as enterprise IoT solutions with a complex connectivity model can pose several challenges. This can affect service provider networks that need to meet such business challenges and commitments. Conventional access networking and core networking technologies have significant shortcomings to meet the growing connectivity demands of M2M devices, for example, to be able to setup faster connections on demand as well as during outage or disaster situations where certain network elements may recover from failure after interruptions.
Conventionally, when a M2M device powers up and needs to connect to the network to obtain a service, the device attaches to an eNodeB (eNB) and then communicates with a Mobility Management Entity (MME) that serves the eNB prior to establishing the session and data connection with a network gateway and/or application server. As the volume of M2M devices in a given serving eNB area grows, the serving MME may not be able to handle the large instantaneous load, resulting in communication failures and/or poor customer satisfaction.